Chris Solinsky is one of only two Americans to have broken both 13:00 for 5000 meters and 27:00 for 10,000 – the other is Galen Rupp. However, at 29-year-old, and after two years of struggling to recover that track form, he’s decided “maybe I’m not the same type of runner I was before.” Therefore, he’s planning to make his debut in the marathon in the fall. He has not yet selected the specific race. “We’re kind of open to anything and everything,” Solinsky said.

A national champion in high school and at the University of Wisconsin who set an American 10,000 record of 26:59.60 in 2010 (since broken by Rupp), Solinsky subsequently required surgery to reattach hamstring tendons to his pelvis, followed by extensive rehabilitation. On the track, 2012 and 2013 were frustrating years, and Solinsky told Runner’s World Newswire that a month ago, he and coach Jerry Schumacher “decided to fully dive into the idea of the marathon. It’s something we’d talked about. For this coming [2016] Olympics, we were going to give it a shot, no matter what, and this [notion] goes back to before I even got injured."

The decision to embrace 26.2 miles was “the culmination of a lot of frustration leading to trying to get ready for this indoor season,” Solinsky said. “Things weren’t clicking the way I was expecting them to be.”

He’d had a satisfactory offseason of base work, but after that, “I was expecting to be progressing more than I was,” he admits. “With the speed stuff, I was essentially at the same place I was last year.”

And he’s in a training group with Lopez Lomong, Evan Jager, Andrew Bumbalough, and Chris Derrick. Struggling to keep up in track workouts was invariably a daunting proposition.

Meanwhile, “the training that was going really well was the strength training,” the work load a marathon would require. “I was so frustrated trying to get back the track fitness,” he tells Newswire. “I was like, 'that’s not going to happen. I just don’t have it anymore.’ That’s when we remembered, in our back pockets, that I’ve always wanted to do the marathon.”

In fact, Solinsky believes that in 2010, at his track peak, “I could have run a damn good marathon. I was doing the same thing that our marathoners have been doing in practice and handling it as well as they did and I wasn’t taking the fluids or anything.”

Now, he says, “the plan is to get myself used to the high mileage again and do a bunch of road races this spring and summer.” The earliest possible appearance he’d make, he guesses, is at the USA 10 Mile Championships in Washington on April 6. He said he might try the Bellin Run, a 10K in June in Green Bay in his home state. "That would be a fun race for me to try,” Solinsky said.

After that, he might travel to late summer road races like Maine’s Beach to Beacon 10K or the seven-mile Falmouth Road Race in Massachusetts, and at some point he knows he needs a half marathon to see “where I’m at.”

The key in all of his selections is to return to the approach taken in his Wisconsin days, when “you wouldn’t really race unless you’re ready to race. This past year, I’d been racing before I was ready to race.”

For much of the time between now and his fall marathon, Solinsky will take a “three weeks on/one week off" approach to training, hitting about 130 miles in the “on” weeks and 90 to 100 when he’s off. “Right now, I’m just focused on trying to get aerobically stronger and be able to handle the work that’s required to get ready” for the marathon, he told Newswire.

Soon, he’ll be going to Flagstaff for altitude training. And, he emphasizes, “I’m open to anyone who’s willing to give me advice. If I bump into Ryan Hall in Flagstaff, I’m certainly willing to get some pointers from him. I’ve bumped into [Dathan] Ritzenhein at Nike [campus in Oregon] and let him know I’m willing to listen to any advice he’s willing to give.”

Solinsky’s decision to move to the marathon was originally reported by Flotrack. He acknowledges having been an overly intense trainer, “blinded by the greed of success that came along with being in really good shape.” He said, “this time around, if I need to take an afternoon off, I'll take an afternoon off. If I need to take a day off, I'll take a day off.”

His struggle to regain form after his surgery caused Solinsky to miss the 2012 U.S. Olympic trials on the track, and he said, “to be honest, there's been a few points of the last two years that I've been really, really close to hanging it up altogether. The only thing that has kept me fully driven and not allowed me to do that has been the idea that I haven't made an Olympic team. That would be a huge regret to walk away without giving it one more shot.”

Solinsky’s best track performance in 2013 was a 13:23 for 5000 meters, which he terms “solid and I’m proud to have run it again. But these days in U.S. distance running, that’s barely scratching the surface. I feel pretty confident in saying my days of setting a personal best in the 5000 are behind me."

Yet he's quick to add, “I haven’t fully closed the book on track,” and he’s holding open the option that marathon fitness could “be a bridge back to the 10K on the track as well. We haven’t fully ruled out doing a 10k on the track but only if it fits” into the prime plan, which is the fall marathon.

As two-time Olympian Matt Tegenkamp, who’d been his teammate since University of Wisconsin days, prepared to do the Chicago Marathon last fall, Solinsky told Newswire in July that “the majority of my work will be with him until then,” building endurance and strength. Tegenkamp clocked a 2:12:28 in Chicago.

Solinsky’s been one of America’s premier distance runners since his high school days. Now, running the marathon at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games is “the ultimate goal,” he said. “It could be portrayed that I’m just trying to stay in the sport or wanting to get a pay day. But this is a means to an end in terms of trying to get myself on that Olympic team," which is the glaring item missing from his running resume.